Archive for the ‘Blogging’ category
Blog Friday
An associate here who regularly blogs on another website we have commented that today was “Blog Friday,” and it hit me that that is a great concept. Blogging needs to be a consistent part of your Internet marketing; something that you do every week, maybe even on the same days, regularly. It should be a habit. Now, I can’t say that I have done very well with this habit…for a couple of years now. But I’m back, baby! One of my goals for this year is to blog three times per week. So let’s explore this idea.
Why would you want to blog regularly? There are some very good reasons:
- You cause your website to grow with content. Google loves websites with lots of content. The more you have, the better.
- You can re-purpose your blogs. We’ve published a couple of books which have been very useful in spreading our brand and attracting clients. Most of the content in those books started as blog posts. You could do the same thing, turning your blog content into articles, reports, books, or anything you can think of.
- It helps establish credibility. Chances are pretty good that if you blog about a particular subject regularly, those who read the blog will think you know what you’re taking about.
- It can cause people to return to your blog to read your updates. This is a very favorable thing. You WANT people to want to come to your website to read what you have to say.
- It can cause you to think critically about what you do. If you’re constantly having to come up with something to say related to your business, it may force you to have to learn some new things about your industry and keep up with what’s going on. This is a very good thing.
So there you have it. Five very good reasons to have your own Blog Friday…or Blog Monday…or whatever day(s) work for you.
Using Amazon.com for Topic Research
If you’ve read much of our blog (or our articles, books, etc.), then you know that we are HUGE advocates of using content distribution as a primary search engine marketing strategy. It has many benefits: it establishes your credibility as an expert, it gets your name in front of a lot of people, it generates many keyword links to your web site, and it drives direct traffic. However, coming from the perspective of someone who has to write many articles on all different subjects on behalf of our clients, I can honestly say that it can be a grind. Sometimes it is hard to find the research material you need to write an article, especially with all the garbage that you find in a typical Google search. However, we’ve discovered that Amazon.com can be an excellent research tool to help you write your content.
The way this works is by using Amazon’s Look Inside feature. This feature allows you to view and read passages from books for sale on Amazon that contain specific keywords. Amazon, shrewd business people that they are, only allows you to use this feature if you are a registered user on the site and have actually ordered something. So sign up for an account and buy yourself a good book to read. Then you’ll be good to go.
To use this as a research tool, you will search books by whatever keyword you are researching. Then, scroll through the list of returned results and find a book that has the “Click to LOOK INSIDE” logo on top of the book cover image. Click on that book cover.
On the next screen, you will see a search box labeled “Search Inside This Book.” This is the search box that allows you to specifically search in the book, so type your keyword in that box and perform another search. You will now be returned a list of links to passages in the book that contain the keyword. If you are a registered user with an order history, then clicking on the link will show you that passage. Otherwise, Amazon will tell you Sorry, you gotta order something first.
Searching through a book like this will provide you with all kinds of information about a keyword from a real book written by a real expert. This can be a richer mine of information than other types of online searches, such as searching article directories.
Anyone can be a successful writer of online content for distribution if he takes the time to do his research. This process can be tedious, but using the best sources of information will make the process a whole lot easier.
The Thirty Minute Writing Challenge
Write thirty minutes every day. That is one of the challenges to myself at the start of 2010. Day three (not counting the 1st, which was a football watching, beer drinking, chilling out kind of day; the 2nd, which was a Saturday devoted to catching up on chores; and Sunday the 3rd, which was a church and family day), this is day three of my New Year’s writing challenge. Assuming I end up typing for in the neighborhood of thirty minutes, I can check off three consecutive days.
So what’s the point?
When I am finished with this piece, I will have three new blog posts or articles, all dealing with my industry, and all containing keywords and keyword links to my main web sites.
If you do that…if you create a new piece of content every single day that gets posted on a blog, or posted to one or a hundred article directories, or to any one of dozens of high quality social media sites…all with keyword links back to your web site…you will accomplish several things:
You will get your name in front of a lot of people.
You will establish your credibility as an expert in your industry.
You will improve your web site’s search engine rankings.
You will drive traffic to your web site.
That is an impressive list of benefits. In the general scheme of things, thirty minutes doesn’t seem like much, but I can attest (and I’m sure many of you will agree) there are many days when you just can’t find a half hour to do nothing but write. So maybe you do it early in the morning. Or maybe you do it at night (it’s 10:34PM Central at the time of this writing). Or maybe you just pay somebody else to do it. It’s worth the effort.
Normally I write something a bit more technical or specific to some aspect of search engine marketing (see the way I linked the keyword “search engine marketing” to my company’s main web site?). My brain is fried from debugging .NET code all day (.NET programming definitely does not fall under the domain of search engine marketing; however, one of the things that Work Media takes pride in is being able to do WHATEVER our clients need us to do to keep selling), so this is what you get.
I’m at 37 minutes…with a couple of lapses to watch a few minutes of reruns of the Office…so I can call this one done.
Blog Comment Linking: Good or Bad?
Recently, in its Google Webmaster blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), Google posted about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs, so we wanted to address this subject.
First off, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. And the Web is built on links. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site’s worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.
For another thing, we don’t think it really makes sense to PUNISH sites for having links to it. That’s not to say Google doesn’t do it, and it seems to have done it in the past, but think about this: if Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn’t I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors’ web sites?
Google says this: “…it’s useless to think of harming your competitor’s ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won’t affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines.”
Ah, there’s the rub. If you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:
1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.
The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.
Here’s another thing: don’t rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.
Here’s another thing that we find odd: one of Google’s suggestions is that a way to prevent this is to set comment links in your blog to no follow. However, it was recently revealed that doing that reduces the value of your own internal-pointing or other do follow links. The reason is that PageRank leaks out of your page from the no follow links, even though the pages the links point to do not get credited with the PageRank. So setting your links to no follow is now damaging to your own SEO efforts.
So what should you do? Don’t worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.
New Twitter Marketing Blog
Okay, check out http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com/. I’ve been deeply involved lately in researching various Twitter management tools. You know how we are…always trying to do more with less. This new blog is the start of our attempt to document what we learn in the process of trying different tools and strategies for using Twitter for business promotion. We hope you’ll hang out.
Now, as to blogging in general…
Be better than me.
Jerry Work here. I do most of the blogging for Work Media. And I haven’t blogged here in over a week. I have been very busy and have actually done a lot of blogging, but for other projects.
So be better than me. Don’t forget about your main blog. Take the time every week to type out original thoughts about your business or industry.
You’re situation is probably a little different than mine. I do a lot of content distribution and blogging type stuff for my clients in all different industries. Honestly…sometimes I just don’t feel like typing out any more blog posts. I really shouldn’t use that as an excuse. But I will any way.
You probably have the luxury of only talking about things related to your business. So take the time to type out your thoughts. It will be well worth it.
Product Recommendation: Tweet Later
I LOVE Tweet Later. I started using the free version several weeks ago to help build up my Twitter follower list by setting the program to automatically follow back anyone who follows me, and to send a personal message to anyone who follows me. Just doing those two things has helped tremendously in launching my Twitter account.
I just started using the paid version, and if you are serious about using Twitter as a marketing tool, then it is well worth the money. With the professional version of Tweet Later, you can pre-configure a bunch of spinnable tweets to be posted at regular intervals. If you set it up right, this can save you a TON of time managing your account.
This strategy is most useful if you already have a lot of content to link to in your tweets. For instance, if you have been publishing a blog for a while, then you can set up a bunch of tweets that link to various blog posts you have written. Similarly, if you have a web site that offers a lot of products, then you can set up a bunch of tweets that link to different product pages.
If you don’t have any existing material to set up lots of tweets for, you can still make good use of Tweet Later. It just might take more work to come up with material for all of your pre-configured tweets.
I do VERY little affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, to a large extent, is offensive to me because it involves people pushing products that are basically garbage. But I am impressed enough by this product that I am officially promoting it to my readers. I officially recommend the professional version of Tweet Later. To learn more, visit this link:
http://www.tweetlater.com/86969.html
By the way, there is a one week free trial (no credit card required!) for the professional version, so I definitely recommend you try it out with all of its features.
Ping.fm for Updating Social Networking Sites
I’ve begun using an online tool called Ping.fm to manage my social networking activities. I have looked at a number of different such applications, but i really like this one. It has a pretty easy to use interface, and it works with a lot of different platforms.
To use it, first you need accounts set up at a few social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and maybe a blog or two. Then you create an account at Ping.fm and add your “networks” by telling the application what sites you want to manage and what your logins for the sites are.
Once that is done, rather than logging into individual web sites to update blogs and statuses and whatnot, you can just type a message into a textbox at the Ping.fm site and it automatically posts it to the various other sites you have configured.
Another interesting feature is that you can also use the application to update your various social networking sites via a mobile device. So if you are away from your computer but have an idea for something to post to your social networking sites, you can just submit the post to Ping.fm via your phone.
This is a concept that I encourage you to explore because it is a high leverage concept. I am a huge fan of writing something once and using it in many different places (when done ethically), and Ping.fm and similar services make that process much easier.
Exciting New Blogger Features that Will Bring Your Boring Blog to Life
Google has been working on some new features of the Blogger blogging platform which are really cool. To try them out, you just need a Blogger account. Then, rather than logging into blogger.com like you normally do, you log into draft.blogger.com. The new features include blog post scheduling, which lets you specify a particular date when a post should go live, and a blog list feature to display information about other blogs you recommend.
The coolest new feature we see is the ability to add Google Gadgets to your blog. This now GREATLY expands how dynamic your blog can be. For instance, I am considering starting a new financial blog. Lucky for me, there are already hundreds of Google Gadgets in the Finance category that can do things like display financial market information or stock tickers. So just like that…bam!…my new blog will be able to display information related to stocks that I talk about in the blog.
There are lots of different categories of gadgets that can be added to a blog. Some more examples include sports gadgets that can do things like feed sports news or photos to your blog, and games that you can add to your blog. Another category of gadgets with a ton of useful potential is Communication. This includes gadgets like Google Talk and Skype, which facilitate communication with your readers and friends. There are currently over 1,300 available gadgets in the Communications category, so you have lots of options to choose from.
Google seems to be working hard to make its blogging platform competitive with other platforms, especially by leveraging Google Gadgets, of which there are many, to add excitement and interactivity to Blogger-hosted blogs. We have recommended Blogger on many occasions and continue to do so. We certainly like the fact that it is owned by Google, so maybe, just maybe, you gain a slight advantage in getting your content indexed for inclusion in Google search results.
If you need some help using your blog for marketing purposes, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Cool New Google Feature: WebCall
Google has a new feature in beta testing that is very cool. It places a button on your web site that lets visitors instantly connect to you on the phone, without showing your phone number. Calls are routed through an online interface and you have the option of answering it or letting your voice mail catch the call. You can even prevent specific numbers from calling you. The feature is called WebCall, and it’s actually made available through a service called GrandCentral.
GrandCentral is a service that was recently acquired by Google. It promotes itself as “the new way to use your phones.” It provides you with one phone number that rings all your phones and one voicemail box that can store all your messages. It also lets you record calls on the fly. This could be a very useful feature for recording audio testimonials for a web site.
Currently, only select people are being allowed to use the service. Select people, that is, and users of Blogger. We’ve stated before that we think there may be an advantage to using Google’s own blogging platform, and this is another one: preferential treatment from Google with regard to new tools and gadgets.
We will be trying out the new call button. Why not? It may turn out that users who would not otherwise have contacted us will do so just because of the convenience. It is definitely worth trying. You never know what little extra convenience will cause the phones to start ringing.
If you don’t blog, start. If you do blog, use Blogger.
If you could use some help with your company’s content or blogging strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.